The present invention relates to a spring manufacturing apparatus and tool selection apparatus, and more particularly, to a spring manufacturing apparatus and tool selection apparatus for manufacturing various shapes of springs by forcefully bending, winding, or coiling a wire with a tool while continuously feeding the wire to be formed into a spring.
For instance, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 9-85377 discloses a configuration of providing plural types of tools at the end portion of a tool axis which is arranged opposite to a wire to be formed into a spring and is made movable along a plane orthogonal to the wire axis line.
However, according to the conventional spring manufacturing apparatus, since various tools are concentrated at the end portion of the tool axis, the end shape of the tool axis is complicated. In addition, special processing is necessary to produce a tool shape which corresponds to the motion of the tool axis, thus requiring a high cost. Moreover, since the tool axis is moved vertically and rotated on an axis at the time of tool selection, the motion of tool axis is complicated. The same problem occurs when the fine and small adjustment of the tool positioning is performed by the tool axis. Furthermore, in order to prevent a wire being formed from interfering with other tools which are not involved in wire forming, complicated control needs to be performed. Moreover, when a tool is exchanged, tools which are not necessary to be changed must be removed, which is a cumbersome operation.
As shown in FIGS. 25 and 26, a tool slide 10 is arranged radially in a spring manufacturing apparatus main body. An abutting tool T is slid in the X-axis direction by a cam 10a, and the amount of movement in the X-axis direction is numerically controllable.
However, i) fine and small adjustment of tool positioning in the Y-axis direction and Z-axis direction, ii) laying out tool slides in the apparatus main body, and iii) changing the movement and angle of a tool slide are still manually performed. For i) and ii), intuition and experience of an expert are required; thus it is difficult to replicate, and is a time consuming work. For iii), an extremely hard labor is required if the apparatus is large.